InMotion Hosting Review

Intro

Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting offers a variety of solutions for business, VPS, dedicated, reseller and WordPress hosting. Los Angeles, CA-based InMotion also strives to provide excellent service. As a result, each support agent receives 160 hours of training so they understand open source, email clients, CentOS and more.

For small business owners looking to build their website from the ground up, InMotion can prove to be a great return on investment. The hosting provider has tools that assist in outfitting your site with extra bandwidth, email accounts and even provides access to premium themes and plugins.

This includes access to InMotion’s library of WordPress themes and plugins for $12.99/month with the purchase of a year subscription. When you commit to a two year WordPress Hosting Plan, it will cost you just $10.99/mo.

Like most hosting providers, you can customize your experience and unlock more or fewer features as needed. Sometimes for free, and other times for an additional fee. InMotion is no different and offers fast web hosting, secure servers, easy setup with one-click installers and access to a free drag-and-drop website builder.

Hosting Packages & Pricing

InMotion offers hosting plans on a monthly, annual and biennial basis. Depending on the length of the package you select, you may qualify for discounts designed to decrease the amount you pay to unlock more features.

The hosting provider’s plans are slightly more expensive (a few dollars per month) when compared to other, similar providers, but have a lot to offer in terms of bandwidth, security and more. In this case, the old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is especially true.

Simply put, InMotion Hosting has some of the most feature-rich plans in the world of hosting. In total, InMotion offers five plans that range from $3.49/month for a Business Hosting Plan to $489.99/month with the purchase of a one-year Dedicated Hosting Plan.

InMotion Hosting Pricing Chart

Shared Business Hosting

InMotion’s Shared Business Hosting is great for small business owners searching for faster and more secure hosting. Both speed and security are achieved via InMotion’s use of SSH technology which provides protocols for operating network services securely over unsecured networks.

If you plan to hire a developer to build and manage your website, know that InMotion supports the following languages:

Perl

PHP

Ruby

Python

MySQL

PostgreSQL

You can find InMotion’s pricing and plan specs, here:

Plan

Pricing

(Biennial)

Pricing

(Annual)

Pricing

(Six Month)

Specs

Launch

$3.99/mo

$4.99/mo

N/A

Free Domain

Two Websites

Unlimited Disk Space

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email

Marketing Tools

Security Suite

Power

$5.99/mo

$6.99/mo

N/A

Free Domain

Six Websites

Unlimited Disk Space

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email

2X Performance

Security Suite

Pro

N/A

$7.49/mo

$7.99/mo

Free Domain

Unlimited Websites

Unlimited Disk Space

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email

4X Performance

Marketing tools

Security Suite

Pro Level Support

With the purchase of a hosting plan, you’ll even reap the benefits of hassle-free site migration. After purchasing a plan, submit a transfer request to have site files, databases, cPanel settings, domain records and email accounts migrated.

Note: Email accounts are only included with cPanel migrations. If you choose a non-cPanel migration, it may require you to manually migrate important data.

Self-Managed VPS Hosting
With-self managed servers, you can do a lot, and the plans are geared more toward those who want to customize their servers for efficiency, speed and, security.

If you want your small business website to experience high uptime and to benefit from the extra processing power, this is the plan for you. The other major benefit is total server customization. There’s also free backup and DDoS Attack Protection, which helps mitigate unplanned downtime.

Managed VPS Hosting
Managed Hosting Servers eliminate the need to worry about uptime, updates and automatic backups, as the process is fully managed for you. Another perk of Managed Hosting, especially for small business owners is that updating emails, databases and domain settings is made simple via the InMotion cPanel.

The biggest convenience of Managed Hosting is the fact that the entire server management and configuration process is taken out of your hands. For small business owners, this can free up tons of additional time to put the focus on growing other areas of your business.

In addition to the features listed below, you’ll gain access to:

Max Speed Zone (Choose your data center)

90-Day Money Back Guarantee

eCommerce Optimization Tools

Free cPanel & WHM

Free Backups

Secure Email

Root Access

Plan

Pricing

(Biennial)

Pricing

(Annual)

Pricing

(Six Month)

Specs

VPS 1000 HA-S

$27.99/mo

$29.99/mo

$24.99/mo

8GB RAM

260 GB Storage

6TB Bandwidth

Free SSLs

VPS-2000 HA-S

$44.99/mo

$49.99/mo

$59.99/mo

6GB RAM

150 GB Storage

5TB Bandwidth

Free SSLs

VPS-3000 HA-S

$64.99/mo

$74.99/mo

$79.99/mo

8GB RAM

260 GB Storage

6TB Bandwidth

Free SSLs

Dedicated Hosting

InMotion’s Dedicated Hosting comes with free SSDs and provides high performance via its single and dual processor Linux servers. Its servers also come with monitoring, provided by a Dedicated Server Hosting Team, who are also available for custom configurations.

Each Dedicated Hosting Plan even gives you free access to the InMotion cPanel and WHM.

In total, there are six plans that range in price from $99.99/mo to $489.99/mo, based on one year plan hosting figures. The higher the plan you choose, the more features you unlock. For the purposes of this review, we have selected three plans, InMotion’s Essential, Elite and CC-2000 Plans.

Plan

Pricing

(Annual)

Pricing

(Six Month)

Specs

Essential

$105.69/mo

$115.99/mo

Intel Xeon E3-1220

3.4GHz Turbo 4C/4T

8GB DDR3

500GB SSD or 1TB 7.2K HDD

Software RAID Available

6TB Data Transfer

5 Free IPs

2 Free Hours of Managed Hosting

Elite

$238.99/mo

$259.29/mo

Intel Xeon E3-1270 v6

4.2GHz Turbo 4C/8T

32GB DDR4

2x500GB SSD or 2x2TB 7.2K HDD

Hardware RAID-1 Included

10TB Data Transfer

15 Free IPs Included

2 Free Hours of Managed Hosting

CC-2000

$519.49/mo

561.49/mo

Dual Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620 v4

3.0GHz Turbo 16C/32T

64GB ECC DDR4 RAM

3X1TB SSD

Hardware RAID-5 Transfer

15 TB Data Transfer

15 Free IPs

4 Free Hours of Managed Hosting

Managed Hosting is perfect for websites with high amounts of traffic. Dedicated Hosting means users have their own server, creating a more browser-friendly experience.

In addition to the above features, each of InMotion’s Dedicated Hosting Plans comes with the following additional features:

Free Automatic Website Backups

30-Day Money Back Guarantee

Advanced Server Caching

Free cPanel with WHM

1-to-1 Sysadmin Time

Robot-less Upgrades

Multi-Layer Defense

CentOS Experts

Tier 1 Network

Free SSD

Reseller Hosting

The benefit of reseller hosting is that you can use the allocated hard drive/bandwidth space for your business and to provide hosting services for profit. This game-changer could help usher in an additional revenue stream for your business.

InMotion offers six Reseller Hosting Plans in total. For the purposes of our review, we have chosen to highlight three.

Plan

Pricing

(Biennial)

Pricing

(Annual)

Pricing

(Six Month)

Specs

R-2000S

$19.99/mo

$27.99/mo

$31.99/mo

80GB Storage

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email

Two IP Addresses

R-3000S

$27.49/mo

$38.49/mo

$43.99/mo

120GB Storage

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email

Three IP Addresses

Reseller VPS-3000

N/A

$89.94/mo

$95.24/mo

8GB RAM

260GB Disk Space

6TB Bandwidth

5 IP Addresses

Here are some additional features offered to Reseller Hosting Plan Holders:

90-Day Money Back Guarantee

Free Server Management

eCommerce Optimized

24/7 Customer Support

Live-State Snapshots

Free Domain Reseller

Free Billing Software

Root Access Allowed

Free Auto Installer

IMAP, POP, SMTP

Free SSD Drives

Free Backups

Site Transfer

cPanel

Additional Features for Reseller Hosting Plans

WordPress Hosting

There are countless benefits of WordPress Hosting. For starters, InMotion Hosting understands the importance of WordPress’s CMS, and therefore created additional security measures, updates and even work to ensure fast site speeds.

There’s also access to InMotion’s knowledgeable support team, who is available 24/7/365.

If this isn’t enough, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and independent practitioners can take advantage of the drag-and-drop website building platform used to design beautiful and customizable websites. Not to mention, there are endless WordPress eCommerce plugins.

Plan

Pricing

(Biennial)

Pricing

(Annual)

Pricing

(Six Month)

Specs

WP-2000S

$10.99/mo

$12.99/mo

N/A

Free Domain

2 Website

50,000 Monthly Visitors

80GB SSD Storage

Unlimited Bandwidth

Unlimited Email Accounts

WP-4000S

N/A

$29.99/mo

$32.99/mo

Free Domain

6 Websites

300,000 Monthly Visitors

160GB SSD Storage

Unlimited Bandwidth

Premium Themes and Plugins Subscription

Free Dedicated IP

WP-6000S

N/A

$114.99/mo

$124.99/mo

Free Domain

20 IP Addresses

240GB SSD Storage

Unlimited Bandwidth

Free Dedicated IP

One of the biggest advantages of this plan is its eCommerce for WordPress feature, which allows you to build a WordPress-based eCommerce store. It is recommended you choose a WP-2000S Plan or above to reap the full benefits.

If you’re looking for more features — this plan likely has something you are looking for:

Pre-installed on Checkout, Launch in Under an Hour

Drag-and-Drop Page Builder with WordPress Plugin

Staging Site Plugin to Conduct Tests

90-Day Money Back Guarantee

eCommerce and other Plugins

Full Design & Hosting Support

Access to Free Themes

Image Gallery Editor

Scheduled Backups

Easy SEO Plugin

With its eCommerce specific features, small business owners can move their physical business online and install plugins such as WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Ecwid and add products in a few short minutes.

Which InMotion Hosting Option is Best for Me?

InMotion’s WP-2000S Plan – tailored to the needs of WordPress sites- is a great bargain for small businesses, and at just $10.99/month for a two-year plan, you can see why.

In this respect, not only is InMotion’s pricing on its small-biz oriented plans quite fair, but they come loaded with features such as a free domain, two websites, 50,000 monthly visitors, 80GB of SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, as well as premium themes and plugin subscriptions.

For small businesses on a budget, this is a feature-rich plan that keeps giving and provides tons of value to you and for site visitors. This is largely due to the fact that InMotion does not cap its bandwidth, which improves the data loading time of your website(s).

Its WP-2000S Plan gives you peace of mind with a 90-day money-back guarantee. All of InMotion’s WP plans are customizable and allow you to increase and decrease elements such as storage, disk space, the number of websites supported and the number of domains.

You will want to keep this in mind if you plan to grow your online business.

Standout Hosting Features

Customer Support

InMotion offers 24/7/365 support based in the U.S., and its support team receives 160 hours of specialized training to provide top of the line support to customers around the world. You can reach support via phone, email, live chat, Skype or InMotion’s ticket system.

Security

Through password protect directories, leech protection, and countless other features, it is clear that InMotion values customer security. The hosting provider also offers countless other features like HotLink protection as well as free SSL certificates and TLS managers to protect sensitive information across the web.

Free Data Backups

Through InMotion’s Shared and Managed Hosting Plans, enjoy the security of knowing your site’s data are backed up. You can also perform manual data backups via the ‘Backup database’ located in the cPanel.

It takes three simple steps to manually backup data with InMotion Hosting:

Finally, you’ll see a compressed .sql.gz file which will serve as a hard copy of your site’s data and can be stored on your computer.

Unlimited Bandwidth

Many of InMotion’s Hosting plans include unlimited bandwidth.

Control Panel

This powerful feature is the backbone of your experience with the hosting provider. InMotion’s cPanel interface is easy-to-navigate and enables users to create email addresses, manage SSH logins, and set up multiple FTP users.

eCommerce Apps

If you run an online eCommerce store, you can install ZenCart, BoxBilling, AbanteCart and over ten other eCommerce-related apps to provide a seamless online shopping experience.

Domain Registration

InMotion offers both 12 and 24-month plans, both of which come with a free domain or domain transfer. If you simply want to purchase a domain, you can do so as well, and it will cost you a one-time fee of $14.99.

If you’re looking for a .com, .net, .org, .us, .biz, or .info domain, you can purchase any of these top level domains.

Each registration includes access to free 24/7/365 U.S. – based support and secure transfer locking, which protects domains from scammers. You will enjoy the convenience of automatic domain renewal and an easy-to-navigate and rather intuitive control panel for managing all of your domains under one roof.

Payment Terms & Conditions

InMotion Hosting stands behind its service, offering a guarantee of reliable hosting, professional and helpful support as well as a 90-day money-back guarantee with the purchase of a Business, VPS or Reseller Hosting package with a term of six months or longer. All Dedicated, VPS and Reseller Hosting packages qualify for a full refund for up to thirty days.

InMotion Hosting accepts the following forms of payment:

Visa

Discover

MasterCard

American Express

Uptime

InMotion Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Pros & Cons

Pros

24/7/365 knowledgeable customer support, including Skype support.

The hosting provider offers free data backups.

InMotion Hosting has a high uptime guarantee (99.9%).

Its Control Panel is easy-to-use.

The hosting provider offers free site migration.

Cons

You have to pay in bulk for hosting services (if you choose a six-month plan or above). The only plan with a monthly billing option is Pro Shared Hosting, which includes a $40 setup fee.

Pro users receive the highest level of service for an additional cost.

InMotion plans are more expensive than other leading competitors.

You have to create separate logins for each add-on you enable.

InMotion data centers are only located in the United States.

Bottom Line

Find Out If InMotion Hosting is Right For Your Business

InMotion Hosting has very public signs of not only stability but great service. First, CNET has given the company much praise for outstanding service. In addition, so has the Better Business Bureau, giving the company an A+ rating (the highest grade given to companies).

Not only does the company focus a lot on providing quality support, it wants to make the hosting process simple for users. InMotion makes this apparent from the implementation of its user-friendly cPanel, which is perfect for small business owners and lets them reference and manage your hosting settings from a single platform.

The process of managing your website hosted with InMotion is also streamlined. You can customize plans to fit your small business needs, be it expansion or scaling back to protect valuable business resources.

Finally, there are so many features dedicated to security, which should be at the top of the list of requirements for business owners who deal with sensitive customer data such as credit card information and more.